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Smells like
team spirit
STRATEGY
Ashley Potter meets Alicia Melis to find out why
studying chimpanzees is something a business
school should be interested in
STRATEGY
A
t the Ol Pejeta Conservancy near Nanyuki in
Kenya, Sultana plays with the other chimpanzees
at the Sweetwaters Sanctuary along the Ewaso
Nyiro River. She was brought to the sanctuary,
which provides lifelong refuge to orphaned chimpanzees,
rescued from the illegal pet trade and from being used as
‘bushmeat’ after being found chained to a tree.
When she first arrived she was terrified of the other
chimpanzees, clinging to her keepers, but now she mixes
happily amongst them and is a proud mother with
two grandchildren.
Alicia Melis knows Sultana and the sanctuary well. She
has been travelling to Kenya regularly to study how the
chimpanzees cooperate, collaborate, and work together.
Back in her office at Warwick Business School on a cold
mid-winter’s morning, the heat and dust of Africa
couldn’t be further away. After working at the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig,
Germany just why is Melis now Assistant Professor of
Behavioural Science at a business school?
“In understanding how humans make decisions and
behave we need to look at the mechanisms that underlie
human behaviour, by doing that better we will be able to
inform areas of research,” says Melis. “I am interested in
cooperation and really all human interactions are based
on some form of cooperation, even though it is difficult
and can break down easily. The better we know our
natural tendencies the more we will understand how
cooperation works in different contexts.”
An evolutionary root for teamwork
Chimpanzees – or Pan troglodytes – are one of the closest
living relatives to humans, sharing approximately 98
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per cent of the human genetic blueprint. So finding a
common behaviour between chimpanzees and humans
points to an evolutionary root for what we might have
thought was something unique to us.
Professor Nick Chater brought Melis to Warwick and
believes her research can play a significant role in a more
thorough understanding of the biases and idiosyncrasies
of human behaviour.
Chater says: “Understanding human cooperation,
coordination and communication are central to
understanding how humans have constructed a
spectacularly complex culture, including teams,
organisations, businesses, and legal and financial systems.
“What are the biological foundations that make
this possible? Alicia’s work focuses on some of the deepest
questions about what makes humans unique, through
exploring comparisons with our closest relative,
the chimpanzee.”
Through a series of trials at Sweetwaters, Melis has
found that teamwork does have a biological past, and that
it has been passed on in our evolution. In one study pairs
of chimpanzees were given tools to get grapes out of a box.
They had to work together with a tool each to get the food
out. Melis found that the chimpanzees would solve the
problem together, even swapping tools, to pull the food out.
Melis says: “The study provides the first evidence that
one of our closest primate relatives not only intentionally
coordinate actions with each other, but that they even
understand the necessity to help a partner perform her role
in order to achieve the common goal. These skills are
shared by both chimpanzees and humans, so such skills
may have been present in our common ancestor before we
evolved our own complex forms of collaboration.”
Melis feels more research looking at the role evolution
M&S 'Leading
Chimpanzees
Ladies' high
at Sweetwaters
profile 2013
Sanctuary
in
campaign
Nanyuki, Kenya
has had in the way we cooperate can help organisations
who need to collaborate at a much larger scale, especially
in public policy where coordinating collaboration between
communities and countries is essential.
“Everything involves cooperation in business and public
policy,” says Melis. “You have cooperation in nature, but
there is no other species like humans with cooperation at
such a large scale, who cooperate between societies and
between people who don’t know each other in so many
different contexts. The key is to understand better what
promotes and what stops cooperation. The larger the group
the more difficult it is to control cheating. We have so many
different mechanisms to control cheating, using reciprocity,
punishment, or reputation – talking badly about somebody
if they don’t cooperate can give them a bad reputation.”
Instinctive behaviour
Research in business tends to involve surveys,
questionnaires, or focus groups, but behavioural science
has already shown that people tend to post-rationalise
their decisions. They often don’t know why they did
something and have to make up a reason after the event.
This instinctive behaviour is where Melis’ research
is digging down, finding that cooperation is almost
instinctive could be a powerful insight for organisations
and governments.
Melis has delved into this by looking at cooperation
among three-year-old children and found that a sense of
fairness is already more evident when it comes to sharing
out the rewards from a team task.
She says: “We found primates are very strategic in their
cooperation techniques, so they understand that only
if they work together are they all going to profit, but when
it comes to distribution of resources at the end they
don’t have the mechanisms that humans have at a young
age. Sharing in a more egalitarian way comes more
naturally for children from a very young age, than it does
for the chimpanzees.
“With chimpanzees, dominant subjects try to
monopolise the resources at the end. Compare that to
young children; they don’t always share – if you give them
a present they don’t share – but if they worked together
with another child, they somehow understand that their
partner also deserves some of the spoils.
“We seem to have mechanisms in place that support
collaborative interactions, but how these resources
were obtained plays an important role. We have this
tendency to share more when we feel we have done things
together, so this can be used to promote more sharing, to
promote the thinking that we are all working together to
reach this goal.”
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